Innocence (16 page)

I try not to think about the fact that Dad told me to find somewhere else to live by my birthday, and that I’ve done nothing, told no one. And if I think about Jay, it immobilizes me completely.

We build a makeshift garage out of tarps, but by 10:00 a.m. the rain is so heavy the roof buckles and Malachi sends me to his van to keep dry and wait for him while he takes it down. The noise of the rain hammering down on the metal roof is deafening. For a while I just sit there, staring at the photographs on the windowsill, staring at the image of Malachi, aching for him to smile at me as he’s smiling at whoever is taking the photograph. But then I decide the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and I want more than that. Restlessly I drum my fingers against the veneer beneath my legs. The seats in caravans are hollow like the seats in boats, for storage. Out the window I can see Malachi still battling with the plastic. I would go and help him, but he was pretty explicit that I come inside and keep dry, and I’m so fucking nosy. Giving in, I stand up and lift the seat cushion, nearly laughing aloud when I see what’s beneath it—biscuits: packets and packets of cookies, digestives, custard creams, and bourbons. Quickly I lift up all the seats: food, books, and musical scores and guitar strings. I pick up a few of the books, curious about his tastes, and an old black binding catches my eye at the very bottom.

A photo album.

I hesitate. I should just put it all back. I have no right to pry into his life, his past, and if he doesn’t want to tell me, I should respect that. But he doesn’t want to tell me anything, ever, and I can’t imagine he ever will.

I sit down and lay the album open on my lap. The photographs are in a mess. Most are loose, though some of the older ones are carefully labeled and stuck neatly to the pages. The very top one catches my eye. In it he is so young, younger even than me, and so, so beautiful with his wild mess of hair and smile that illuminates everything. It makes me feel weak inside, and I could look at him for hours. I want this picture. It tugs at me… something about it, him… I can’t quite put my finger on it. Glancing out the window again, making sure Malachi is still busy, I shove it in the back pocket of my damp jeans.

Slowly I leaf through the rest of the loose pictures. In these he’s older, at a festival, skinny jeans and a ripped T-shirt, hair long and falling in his eyes—there are even a couple of him up on the stage with a microphone, playing, singing, looking like he was born to be there.

Stupidly, I become engrossed.

When the door swings open, I nearly jump out of my skin, almost dropping the album onto the floor. Soaked to the skin, Malachi stares at me from the doorway, his shocked expression disintegrating into fury. I have nowhere to hide. Water pouring off him, he snatches the album out of my hand, scattering the loose photographs across the floor.

“Go!” he shouts.

I flinch, mortified he’s caught me like this. “What?”

“Get out.”

Bile rises up in my throat. I know what I’ve done. I know I’ve betrayed his trust, but he’s not just angry, he’s upset, and it scares me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice wavering.

He grabs my arm, and instinctively I tense, ready to fight him if he tries to force me, but a moment later he lets go.

“Please, just go,” he says, suddenly deflating and sinking down to the sofa, his head in his hands. “I thought I could do this, but I can’t.”

I sway sickly as though his words have a physical effect. “Can’t do what?” My voice is unbearably high. I’ve fucked everything up.

Red blotches appear on his face and neck. He grips his hair and rocks forward.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, picking up the thin shirt I used as a coat.

Praying the car is open, I go outside. It’s not far, but the pouring rain soaks me through.

Once I’m inside, I stare at the blur of glass, the gray-washed mess of everything. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve fucked it up with Jay, with Malachi, I now have no job, and as of tomorrow I have nowhere to live.

It might be minutes, it might be hours when the car door opens and Malachi gets in beside me. I don’t even turn my head.

“What I did was unforgiveable,” I say numbly, the words rehearsed in my head since I came out here. “I know it’s easy to say sorry, but….”

“Don’t ever go through my stuff again,” he says bluntly.

I can’t meet his eyes.

He holds out his hand. In it is a photograph. It’s not one of the ones I looked at. His hand is shaking. “You should have this…. I know your dad burned everything when she left.”

Curious, I take it from him, and catch my breath when I see it’s a photograph of us—of me and Jay and Mum, the three of us sat smiling in a sunny field, Jay on Mum’s lap, me off to the side, my hands full of seedpods and flowers. It’s before Jay’s accident, and he and I are so alike. Tears splash down my cheeks before I can stop them.

“I took this photograph,” Malachi says softly.

Wiping my tears away with the back of my hand, I still won’t meet his eyes.

“I know how much you want to ask me,” he says, trying to contain the emotion in his voice. “And I know I haven’t been fair. So ask me. Ask me how I knew Isabella.”

T
HE
RAIN
is like white noise, blocking out the world around us, masking my silence into an acceptable pause. Of course I want to ask him how he knew my mother, but I can only stare at the photograph in my hands, trying to step back in time, trying to remember. I was no more than five or six. Jay three at the most.

He’s perfect, though. A smiley, happy toddler, Mum’s arms around him. He always loved her more than I did, or maybe it was just their bond was stronger and that was why I had to find something for myself, something I discovered out in the fields and woods, beneath the endless stretches of sky.

“I was saving up to go find her. For Jay. He needs her, I think.” My chest feels so empty as I say those words. I don’t even know what I’d say to her anymore.

“I’m sorry she left you.” Malachi’s voice is barely more than a breath. “It was an unforgiveable thing to do.”

His sentiment shocks me, but I don’t have time to think about it as he carries on speaking. “She never called me Malachi. I didn’t expect you to remember me, you were so young then. Yet, I suppose….”

I’ve never seen him so unsure and not himself, it makes me want to put my arms around him and tell him it’s okay.

“I suppose when I saw you again, I was disappointed you didn’t.”

All at once it comes together—there is only one person I remember who could have taken this picture of us—the dark-haired boy with the endless patience and the guitar, who sang us songs and let me sit on his lap and hold down the strings as he played…. The boy in the photograph I have in my jeans.

“Kai,” I say, frowning with concentration as if I’m drawing the name from a memory so deeply buried and far away, it actually hurts to call it back. I look up.

He gives me a tight smile and closes his eyes. If it was anyone else, I’d say they might be trying to hide their emotions. With Malachi, I
know
he is.

“You left,” I tell him, though the way I say it is more like an accusation.

I missed him so much, I used to cry myself to sleep. I was inconsolable. The only way I could deal with it was by forgetting, burying my memory of him deep, deep down.

It surprises me when he wipes his eyes with the palm of his hand and takes a deep, shaky breath.

I pull the picture I took out of my pocket and hold it out to him. I don’t want to give it back, but we’re being honest, and I know it will weigh me down. “I shouldn’t have taken it.”

“It’s okay.” He smiles, fleeting and lopsided. “If you want a picture of me as a dumb kid, you can have it. I had yours all these years.”

“You were never dumb. You were beautiful.
Are
,” I say self-consciously, refusing to look away when his eyes meet mine. Seconds pass, and I begin to feel light-headed, my heart beating in my ears.

“Don’t, Christopher,” he murmurs eventually.

But I can’t be imagining the look in his eyes, I can’t be imagining the way he swallows and looks away as though he’s trying to hold something back.

“Tell me, then,” I whisper.

Before he starts, he stares at me long and hard, some internal debate going on in that complicated head of his.

“Of all the people I’ve ever known, you’re the one person I never wanted to have hate me.”

Puzzled, I frown at him, but I don’t say anything. His words make me apprehensive.

He doesn’t look at me as he starts to speak.

“I never really had much of a family, they were more a selection of people who got pissed together and fought. When I was sixteen, I couldn’t stand any more of it, so I left. We lived near the river, and the previous summer I’d found a small half-sunk boat lost in the undergrowth. I fixed it up with plastic sheets to make it weatherproof and traveled downstream. I had nothing. I stole stuff to survive. Anything. Clothes, food, drink, things I could sell. The unwritten rule with travelers is that you don’t take from your own. I ignored that completely. After weeks on my own, I saw a man and a woman with two kids, living on a big riverboat. They had plenty to eat. I was starving. One night I broke in to their boat. I just needed something to eat. The woman woke up. She was frightened I was going to hurt her children. They were asleep in a hammock in the main cabin: two boys. I hadn’t seen them when I came in. Now I was between them and her. I had a knife, but it was only for my protection. For show. I would never have used it, but she didn’t know that. She pleaded with me to let her past so she could go to them before they woke up. But I was sixteen and hard. I’d been kicked down all my life. No one had ever given me the power I had in that moment. I said no.” He stops, looks out the window, imperceptibly shifts away from me. When he starts speaking again, his voice is quieter, farther away.

“I think she did the only thing she thought she could. She took off her clothes and stood in front of me. She put my hand on her naked breast and said ‘Put the knife down.’ I did. I’d never touched anyone like that, never been with a girl. I think she knew. In that moment she saw me for what I was, a scared, lonely kid. She took my hand and led me up on deck. I followed her like a lamb. I was the one terrified now. She had a power I hadn’t reckoned on. She sat on deck with me all night, just talking. My head in her lap, a blanket round her shoulders, she stroked me like I was an animal that needed comfort. She was the only person who knew how to deal with me. She just seemed to understand. My whole life no one had understood me like that. In the morning I brought my boat alongside and Isabella introduced me to her husband and her sons, Christopher and James.”

Pausing, he glances at me, searching my face for a reaction, but I have none. I’m holding my breath.

“You were five, watchful and curious about everything, spending long hours in the fields near the river, alone in the silence. No one had ever looked up to me like you did. You made me feel important. And James was three, louder and more confident—he got the most attention from everyone. Except me.”

Malachi looks down at his hands, oil stained, weatherworn. I’m still not breathing. It’s as though everything has stopped but his words, his story.

“Isabella used to take me out for walks in the fields, and we’d fuck. Your father suspected nothing. To this day I don’t think he knows. It’s up to you if you want to tell him. I deserve it.”

I feel sick. Physically sick. And it hurts. Not because she was unfaithful to Dad, or that Malachi was so young, but because I’m
jealous
, because he loved her, I can tell, and I hate her… I hate her…. I can’t breathe.

I gasp, struggling my way out of the car and into the rain. The sky is black and roiling, the wind whipping through the trees, flattening all the grass against the earth.

“Christopher!” he shouts desperately as I stumble away, slip-sliding rain blind through the mud. “Please, Christopher!”

But I can’t be his fucking confessional. There’s only so much I can take. I don’t care where I’m going—I’m just going. How can he say he doesn’t want me to hate him, then tell me this? I don’t understand why. I fall against his van.

Maisie pokes her nose out into the rain to lick my fingers.

The rain beats down on my body.

I fall into the void.

“I’m taking you home.” His voice warns me a few moments later, before strong arms hook round my chest and lift me out of the mud.

I don’t struggle. I don’t lean into him either. He hauls me into the car, mud and all, and drives.

The whole journey I hardly move, my arms round my head, my head in my lap, curled in on myself as though I’m preparing for a crash landing.

The car stops. I assume we’re at the Tavern, but when I look up, we’re just pulled over at the side of the road somewhere.

“The day Jay was hurt—”

“Don’t,” I force out, my teeth gritted. Hating the irony that now I don’t want to know, he doesn’t want to stop talking. I know what he’s going to tell me. I can work it out. “I get it. You were with her. She left us alone on the boat that day to be with you.”

Eyes wide, he nods. His guilt is almost palpable.

This is why he was so uncomfortable around Jay.

Oh, how easy it would be to tell him I think it was all his fault. To tell him I would never have tried to boil the milk on the stove to make Jay and myself a drink if Mum was there, if she hadn’t left us to be with him. Jay’s accident would never have happened, and the burns to his face that control his whole life would not be there. And I could do all that because I’m hurting, hurting so badly I want to destroy everything, and I
want
to hurt him.

But it wasn’t Malachi’s fault, it was hers and it was mine, and no referring of blame is ever going to take that away.

“And that was why you left, because you felt
guilty
,” I snarl, but it’s just a mask, because inside I feel split apart and dislocated from everything around me.